Canada Rules Dire Straits Song Offensive

BY Julie Bolcer

January 13 2011 11:25 AM ET

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that “Money for Nothing,” the hit 1980s song by rock group Dire Straits, is too offensive for broadcast because its uses the word “fa**ot.”

The Vancouver Sunreports, “The ruling, released Wednesday, responded to a complaint submitted to St. John's radio station CHOZ-FM over a Feb. 1 airing of an unedited version of the song, which mentions the word three times.”

The 1985 song, told from the perspective of a working-class man who marvels at the apparent charmed life of rockers on that new invention MTV, is perhaps even better known for its animated music video, which heralded the dawn of the music video era. The video for the song was the first played on MTV Europe.

In its ruling the Canadian council said that social attitudes had changed about the word “fa**ot” from 1985 to 2010, the time of the complaint last year.

“The council concluded that ‘fa**t,’ when used to describe a homosexual man, is a word ‘that, even if entirely or marginally acceptable in earlier days, is no longer so,’” reported the Sun.